Maybe this is the real question Jeb was anxious to avoid when he flubbed his answer about Iraq

Looking beyond Jeb Bush's disastrous handling of the question about authorizing the Iraq war from a political standpoint, there is also the matter of letting the Bush administration off the hook by invoking "faulty intelligence" that resulted in "mistakes made."   Here's what Jason Linkins had to say in his Huffington Post article:

"Of course, as Judd Legum points out over at ThinkProgress, all of this overlooks a central fact about the run-up to the Iraq War:   It's actually too charitable by half to write off the disastrous military misadventure as a failure of intelligence.  It's much more accurate to say that the George W. Bush administration misused or ignored intelligence. Per Legum: 

A bipartisan, if contentious, report of the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that the George W. Bush administration “repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent"  The report documented numerous statements made by the Bush administration to justify the war that were not supported by intelligence.      

Mike McConnell, the Director Of National Intelligence under George W. Bush from 2007 to 2009, found the administration "set up a whole new interpretation because they didn’t like the answers” the intelligence community was giving them.  Inside the Pentagon, an effort was led by Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith to “reinterpret information” provided to them by intelligence. It was Feith’s group that produced and promoted “false links between Iraq and al Qaeda.”  

"But whether Jeb Bush's answer was a misstep, a mis-hear or a glorious glossing over of the past, the bottom line is that -- like I said before! -- the best answer to Kelly's original question was simply 'No.' Alas!"

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So here's my new theory.   It isn't just Jeb's political ineptness.   I'm thinking that he and Dubya have had a little talk since he first tried to distance himself.   And Jeb has been persuaded that it could be very damaging to Dubya (and hence to Jeb himself) for people to start poking around again into the decision to invade Iraq.   So best to just emphasize solidarity and loyalty and hope it goes away.

Here's where the ineptness comes in.    Jeb was so anxiously torn, realizing how perilous this could be to both brothers' legacies, that he literally couldn't think straight.   And he flubbed his lines -- only making it many times worse.

You think people aren't going to follow up on this?   Jeb is toast, and the sooner he bows out the better it will be for Dubya.    Kiss it good-bye, Jeb.   Your slacker brother really did ruin it for you.   But you wouldn't have made it anyway.   You're just not that good a politician.

Ralph